“Well, I think I’ll take another horse before I try it,” returned Ollie.

“Might try Old Browny,” I said.  “If he ever came up to a tumbleweed he would lie right down on it and go to sleep.”

“Yes, and Blacky would hold it with one foot and eat it up,” said Jack.  “Unless he took a notion to turn around and kick it out of existence.”

We looked the queer plant over carefully, and found it so closely branched that it was impossible to see into it more than a few inches.  The branched were tough and elastic, and when it struck the ground after being tossed up it would rebound several inches.  But it was almost as light asa thistle-ball, and when we turned it loose it rolled away across the prairie again as if nothing had happened.

“They’re bad things sometimes when there is a prairie tire,” said Jack.  “No matter how wide the fire-break may be, a blazing tumbleweed will often roll across it and set tire to the grass beyond.  They’ve been known to leap over streams of considerable width, too, or fall in the water and float across, still blazing.  Two years ago the town of Frontenac was burned up by a tumbleweed, though the citizens had made ah approved fire-break by ploughing two circles of furrows around their village and burning off the grass between them.  These big red ones must be worse than the others.  I believe,” he went on, “that tumbleweeds might be used to carry messages, like carrier-pigeons.  The next one we come across we’ll try it.”

That afternoon we caught a fine specimen, and Jack securely fastened this message to it and turned it adrift: 

“Schooner Rattletrap, September —­, 188-:  Latitude. 42.50; Longitude, 99.35.  To Whom it may Concern:  From Prairie Flower, bound for Deadwood.  All well except Old Blacky, who has an appetite.”

The night after our stop by the unfinished house we again camped on the open prairie, a quarter of a mile from a settler’s house, where we got water for the horses.  This house was really a “dugout,” being more of a cellar than a house.  It was built in the side of a little bank, the back of the sod roof level with the ground, and the front but two or three feet above it.

“I’d be afraid, if I were living in it, that a heavy rain in the night might fill it up, and float the bedstead, and bump my nose on the ceiling,” said Jack.

Ir had been a warm afternoon, but when we went to bed it was cooler, though there was no wind stirring.  The smoke of our camp-fire went straight up.  There was no moon, but the sky was clear, and we remarked that we had not seen the stars look so bright any night before.  The front of our wagon stood toward the northwest.  We went to bed, but at two o’clock we were awakened by a most violent shaking of the cover.  The wind was blowing a gale, and the whole top seemed about to be going by the board.  We scrambled up, and I heard Jack’s voice calling for me to come out.  The cover-bows